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Clinton Camp Mastered The Science Of Politics But Forgot The Art, Staffers
Say | The Huffington Post

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5833866de4b030997bc10520

Clinton Camp Mastered The Science Of Politics But Forgot The Art, Staffers
SayThere was a universe of voters on the fence. What the campaign did to
reach them has splintered its ranks.
Sam Stein Senior Politics Editor, The Huffington Post </us/author/sam-stein>

10 hours ago

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Democrat Hillary Clinton the night before the presidential election.

In a private conference call with top campaign surrogates just days after
the election, several high-ranking Hillary Clinton
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/hillary-clinton/> campaign officials
offered an overview of how, exactly, they came up short against Donald Trump
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/donald-trump/>.

It fell on Navin Nayak, the campaign’s director of opinion research, to
offer the statistical explanation. Nayak, whose role in the presidential
campaign had gone almost entirely unnoticed until after its unravelling,
noted that in the closing weeks before the election, internal models had
both Trump and Clinton losing roughly the same percentage of the vote to
third-party candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson. All of Stein’s support
was coming from Clinton’s camp, while Johnson was taking more from Trump
but a little from Clinton too, he explained. But when the final data came
in, the campaign was shocked by how far off its assumptions had been.

“People who were unfavorable to both candidates, instead of breaking evenly
as we thought, overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump by a 20 to 30 percent
margin,” Nayak said, according to notes taken by the attendee.

Senior campaign adviser Jennifer Palmieri jumped in with an assessment that
was, by that point, redundant: “There seemed to be a bit of a secret Trump
vote.”

It has been almost two weeks since that call. But the dispute over why so
many late deciders went to Trump over Clinton remains unresolved within the
Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party writ large. Its answer could play
a dramatic role in the trajectory taken by the party in the Trump
administration <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/trump-administration/>
era, informing everything from party messaging to campaign tactics.

Speaking after Nayak, both Palmieri and campaign chairman John Podesta
offered their own explanations. Podesta placed blame on FBI Director James
Comey for re-launching an ultimately fruitless investigation into Clinton’s
emails just days before the vote. Palmieri, meanwhile, pushed back on
criticism that Clinton wasn’t enough of a progressive-populist, that Sen.
Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would have won had he been the nominee, noting that
Clinton did better in Wisconsin than former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), an
unimpeachable liberal firebrand. Both criticized the proportionality of the
media coverage of Clinton-related controversies to those surrounding Trump.

Outside of leadership circles, however, a different type of explanation has
been considered, one that places more blame on strategic calculations than
external factors. Officials who worked in various battleground states say
the campaign erred in its belief that modern technology could fully replace
traditional pavement-pounding, that Clinton didn’t need to score major
victories with on-the-fence voters if she could turn out the committed.

“This whole narrative that they didn’t do a good enough job talking to
undecided voters in blue collar areas and exurbs is wrong,” said a senior
battleground state operative. “They didn’t do talking. They had this
strategic decision that voter registration was a better use of their time
than persuasion. It was a bullshit false choice.”

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Clinton the day after her election defeat.

In the course of an election, a campaign performs three basic functions in
order to win votes, which, in the end, is the fundamental goal in a
democratic system of governance. The first is registration: the act of
getting individuals able to cast votes. The second is persuasion: the act
of trying to convince people that you deserve their vote. And the third is
get out the vote (GOTV): the act of getting people to actually vote.

Different campaigns place different emphases on each of these functions
depending on the electorate and election. For the Clinton campaign,
emphasis was placed on the first and the third. Part of it was sober-minded
calculation. Traditional persuasion is, in many regards, viewed as
antiquated, something candidates did before the internet liberated them to
have countless more conversations with voters at a fraction of the cost.
Certainly, data show that it can require a large investment of resources
with little payoff. But part of it was also a sense that in a contest
between two universally known candidates, it would be difficult to change
people’s minds, to actually persuade them.

The Clinton campaign still tried. It modeled voters based on their risk
aversion and desire to change political leadership. It pinpointed messages
to persuade Stein supporters to vote Democratic and scored how undecideds
could be moved based on specific issues delivered over specific mediums
(TV, mail, digital and so on). The result allowed the campaign to pinpoint
voters with helpful specificity. For example, the campaign concluded that
white working-class men with daughters were more likely to vote for Clinton
if they saw language Trump used to describe women than by straightforward
economic messaging.

But the campaign didn’t put much human capital behind persuasion save for
in specific states with a large population of independent voters, like New
Hampshire, where the campaign’s state director, Mike Vlacich, said they
started in late spring 2016. It did not have canvassing operations up and
running over the summer months in places like Florida and Michigan. And
when it did have volunteers and canvassers fan out, they were sent to take
advantage of early voting deadlines.

At the state and county level, this left operatives worried that they were
both leaving potential votes unattended and relying way too heavily on
getting their own people to the polls. Their margin for error, in other
words, was being self-limited.

One operative who volunteered with the group Jewish Women for Hillary noted
that members kept asking for scripts to make persuasion calls only to be
instructed to do ballot collection and other GOTV activities

“The undecided voters were being left to their own devices,” the operative
said. “And in that instance, if no one has reached out with a personal
touch or the candidate hasn’t shown up, well, when all that bad information
comes their way and momentum is so on the side of change, there is nothing
to stop that wave.”

One campaign organizer in the Midwest said that canvassers were told not to
leave literature on doors because it wasn’t statistically persuasive. (The
“pledge to vote” cards they brought with them were brought back to the
campaign offices for GOTV.)

“It was a national decision based on data,” the organizer said. “Everyone
knew who she was and he was, so there wasn’t any statistical reason to
persuade people. The only way to make a difference was to add people to the
rolls through voter registration.”

A similar situation was recounted by two operatives who worked with the
Clinton campaign in Florida. Each said that the time and human capital put
behind persuasion was pinched when headquarters in Brooklyn, New York,
directed them to extend their voter register efforts. The assumption, said
one of the organizers, was Clinton would win the state if she could
reconstruct the coalition President Barack Obama
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/barack-obama/> had put together and
benefit from the natural diversification of the state’s population.

It wasn’t a terrible bet to make, said Steve Schale, who ran Obama’s two
campaigns in Florida. But it also meant that Clinton would be banking
heavily on strong Democratic turnout.

“My sense of it was they took an approach that if we draw a circle around
Miami and run up record numbers, and if everything else stays the same, we
should win. Which is right,” said Schale. “But my global take of the state
is it is not a turnout or persuasion state. There are people who think it
is a turnout state: If you hit your numbers you will win. My view is that
if both parties hit their numbers you will both get to 47 percent. It is
never not persuasion. You have to do persuasion and turnout.”

ASSOCIATED PRESS
There was a sense that in a contest between Donald Trump and Hillary
Clinton, two well-known candidates, it would be difficult to change
people’s minds.

Clinton will end up winning the popular vote in the 2016 election and by a
fairly sizable margin
<https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/133Eb4qQmOxNvtesw2hdVns073R68EZx4SfCnP4IGQf8/htmlview?sle=true#gid=19Hillary>.
But elections in America aren’t democratic on a national scale. They
require a candidate to cobble together enough state Electoral College votes
to win. And in a number of key battleground states, Clinton was undone by
the 20 percent to 30 percent of the late deciders who unexpectedly turned
to Trump.

For those operatives who worked in those states, it is clearer now than it
was even during the campaign that they should have buffered themselves
against that potential wave. Investments that were made in Arizona and the
Omaha market (where one Electoral College vote was at play) seem
particularly questionable in light of the frustratingly close margins in
Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

“They were overextended,” said the senior battleground state operative.

But for the top ranks of the Clinton campaign, the failure is not so much
about poor decisions as it is about poor data. Their models showed that the
best way to defeat Trump was to paint him as unqualified for the office of
the presidency, which they successfully did. Voters just ended up not
caring. As one top official asked: When your own polling shows you are
likely to win and the public polling says the same, “what would you have
done differently?”

The next Democratic presidential nominee will have to tackle that question
and, by extension, the question of whether Clinton’s failure was a sui
generis byproduct of the current climate or a strategic misstep by her
campaign. He or she will also be left to decide to what extent campaigns
can work off of hard data and statistical models and how much the old ways
should be reintroduced into strategic considerations.

“Sometimes I worry, as we’ve embraced more of the science of politics and
less of the art, we draw boxes around people and have algorithms for
determining how they will vote,” said Schale. “In reality, I’m not sure it
is the most efficient way to win.”


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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